PrintFebruary 26, 2011
Your Money Belongs To Politicians
If I had to pinpoint one single way in which our country has gone astray, I'd say that it's when we allowed politicians to manipulate the tax code to benefit those whom they favor. There are many ways, of course, in which our country's trajectory has taken a downward rather than upward turn, but politicians' control of individual citizens' money, their taking great quantities of it as though it actually belonged to the politicians to use for their own benefit and for politicians' chosen purposes, has bankrupted us not only fiscally but morally.
The other day our two-year-old threw a dollar bill into the gas fireplace. It was snowing outside and perhaps he had a reason for his action. I don't know what it was or why he did it. In like manner our politicians daily throw our dollar bills into the fire and I cannot fathom why they take such actions. I suspect that they know nothing more about the true value of a dollar than the two-year-old. Since it's not the politicians' own money perhaps they feel that they have no obligation to be good stewards of it; it's just paper and burning it is okay. But it's no longer okay with productive U.S. citizens.
Politicians have derived their power over you from control of your money. As politicians have taxed -- and excused from taxes by awarding favors or exclusions -- they have changed the nature of doing business in this country. It's no longer a straightforward idea: make a product which delights the customer and sell it at a profit so you can stay in business. Instead it's constant uneasiness and worry on the part of businesses, large and small, about the ways in which government will interfere with a business's ability to survive and continue to hire employees. How can any thinking business person plan ahead when politicians have taken away from them the ability to project business plans ahead? How can a business prosper when business leaders must make business decisions based on potential ever-changing tax policy? Politicians are so unknowing that they don't understand that stability of tax rules and of regulations is necessary for a system to work. Politicians fail to look at the whole system but focus on the pieces. The business which does not take into account the vagaries and whims of today's U.S. government will not survive economically.
This is to say nothing of the arcane and complex rules and regulations concerning the right to do business in the U.S. Someone said that we are always breaking some law every day. How could we not? Take politicians' desires to control all aspects of our lives through taxation and rules and combine them with the whims of bureaucrats and we have disaster. I can remember long ago reading Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago and marveling at the awful situation in which the protagonist found himself as he tried to navigate the Russian and then the Soviet corrupt bureaucracies. Now I find that the U.S. has arrived at the same point as the old Soviet Union. Our politicians have taken us to the Orwellian point of Newspeak and Doublethink. Politicians, and especially Mr. Obama, somehow have come to think that we will believe them when they speak bureaucratese. But the American people have awakened and thinking people have found each other via the internet. We will continue to communicate, past the talking political heads, and the day may come when we band together.
When we understand as a group all of the power grabs the politicians have pulled off, especially those concerning their control of our money, then we might choose to elect those who understand that monetary and tax actions have consequences, sometimes unintended. We need smarter, more honorable politicians who have learned to listen to the voice of the working, productive people. We need politicians who tax for the public good, not for their own ideological aims. We need politicians who are just better overall than the generally self-interested and corrupt group who have for too long inhabited our nation's capital.
Leo Tolstoy commented that "Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six" and also in 1886 in What Then Must We Do? he wrote, "I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means-except by getting off his back."
We need politicians to get their hands off our money, get off our backs, and stop treating us as though they have the carrot and we're the donkey. We've grown those carrots and they belong to us.
Priscilla Petty, a syndicated newspaper columnist for eleven years, produced The Deming of America video about quality guru and systems thinker W. Edwards Deming.
